Category: Performances

Let me say up front that I like Jake Heggie’s work. I feel he has a true gift for soaring and meaningful melody, a great ear for orchestral effects, a talent for picking good source material, and a knack for crafting affecting melodrama (in the best sense of that word) that can move an audience to tears.

Do dysfunctional families outnumber the ones that move through life untroubled, or is it — to paraphrase Tolstoy — that every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way and thus of greater interest to writers and composers?

I bet this doesn’t happen at the movies:

Let us, for one example among many, take the capstan song in Act I.

James Conlon has become the artistic heart and soul of Los Angeles Opera in his second season as music director.

The Opera Company of Philadelphiaís February production is the second staging of David DiChieraís new opera Cyrano, a co-production with Michigan Opera Theater and Florida Grand Opera.

Opera North is one of the most innovative opera companies in Britain.

Perhaps the most beloved comic opera, Rossiniís Il barbiËre di Siviglia has never left the repertoire.

San Diego Opera apparently has raided the vaults of Lincoln Center opera companies, circa the 1970s.

The Royal Opera’s new Salome is set roughly in the 1930s, in surroundings which refer overtly to Pasolini’s SalÚ or the 120 Days of Sodom, populated by uniformed soldiers and naked whores.